


The Mirror Crack'd

by dorothy_notgale and Tromperie (dorothy_notgale)



Series: Grim Tales [2]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Entropy, Horror, M/M, TVL, Time - Freeform, perspective, pl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-02-10
Packaged: 2018-09-23 06:03:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9643664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale%20and%20Tromperie
Summary: Lestat looks into mirrors, and sees himself. As so often happens, he has a... complicated relationship with his reflection.Who is the fairest, after all?





	

Lestat wanted to be good, as a boy. Strove for it.

Fought for it.

For many reasons.

And among them--the Dreams.

He didn't know evil, not like that. Cold.  _ Old. _ Cruel and smiling and powerful.

But it knew him, wore his face like it owned it (He saw his own face rarely, in still water with only small shivers of breeze or distorted polished silver, or the rippled glass windows of the Lenfants' shop. Perhaps that was what it really looked like.)

He considered telling his mother, sometimes. He thought she would understand, but. But. If she didn't.

If she  _ did. _

If she thought him destined, from the hunting and the meat, the beatings. The hate he bore his Father, whom he was bound to honor, according to the monks.

Prayers were words. He recited them.

He would get the urge, sometimes, to rush into his mother's room and smash the tall, beautiful mirror that was her own small kingdom. His father would say he was mad, but more importantly she would loathe him. She'd never understand what he was protecting her from.

He dreamed about stalking into their bedroom as they slept and dragging his father from the squat four poster bed, of beating him over and over and over until his face lost recognizable shape, and Lestat's fists were welted and bloody; and doing the same, then, to his brothers and drinking in the way their mockery turned to screams. 

And he would wake in a sweat, trembling at the concoctions of his own mind. Fearing that he might indeed be mad, and that creature was steadily reaching through and changing him.

The Devil was seductive, they said. And this Prince of Darkness was nothing so much as charming, smiling bright as the morning star at those he ruled in his little Hell. Smiling back at Lestat, from mirrors in his mind.

His smile had teeth to it, and he was a hunter. He savaged his…

Subjects?

Meat?

(Lestat was gentle, so gentle with the girls, with Nicki. He tried to forget the sight of blood on snow, like blood on dead-white skin. He kissed closed-teeth, feeling something strange and hungry and evil, and he knew evil was not punished, for Justice was no real thing.)

He feared for Nicki more than himself. Once he had caught sight of a dark-haired beauty in his dreams, and his heart had stopped. He'd known them, though that was impossible. Their eyes were green (and dark) and their hair was black (and brown, and tied with a silk ribbon), and in his dream their sadness had touched him until he wept and tried to run, overwhelmed by it. 

He thought of that dream when he hurried to get drunk in their little room, to smile more and tell Nicki that it was all possible, even the patent absurdities.

That face, his face, haunted him. He wanted it  _ back, _ would steal it, and in the theater it was his again. He smeared white greasepaint over his features, daubed in contrast and rouged his lips until he resembled an aristocrat. No, royalty. One who had never walked in the browning summer sun, checking his traps; all that face's prey came ready-caught, bewitched.

It was  _ his _ when he wore it, and when he saw it in the mirrors at Renaud's he didn't fear it.

Until it shifted.

Until the eyes shone, the mouth grinned. Until it twisted with contempt at his recoils.

He thought he saw it in the audience, on occasion, or gleaming on the streets late at night.

Lestat wanted so much to be good. Even if he didn't believe there was a God to judge them, and the mere thought of death made his chest tighten in panic; still, he handed pennies to children when he and Nicki walked through the market, and held his tongue when Nicki's college friends came by so as not to scare them off. It was so little, what he did on that stage. The face and Nicki both mocked him, but that only made him hold on tighter. 

And then. 

And then. 

Seeing that horrible creature in his rotting tower was a different terror than the Dark Moment. It wasn't a realization but a certainty, a grim confirmation of everything he'd run from. And only his terror of death was stronger than his resolve.

And then the face was his, the face in the glass, and it smiled so. Not cold and ancient like the other. Smiled like him.

He was there; that was Lestat, rambunctious, mischievous, but loving. He'd not really--

Never really--

Oh, God, God who didn't exist, the  _ teeth! _

And the creature smiled, with his face, and it did something it had never done before. And with dawning horror he realized-- _ it could see him too. _

He laughed, loudly, helplessly. He laughed and laughed and then he found other faces, like his but wrong, too, dead and rotting and less awful than this, and he laughed at them too. It was a horrific face, and a beautiful one. It showed nothing.

The others at least decayed.

 

~*~*~*~

 

Lestat hated the dreams. Had for years; in the death sleep, he--misremembered.

The Voice, perhaps, tormenting him.

But that wasn't right, was it? The Voice was just Amel, and he was with him now. He'd only ever wanted love, and understanding, and as soon as they'd touched minds Lestat had understood that too. He'd saved them, finally. All of them. 

And now he was rewarded with this sense of peace, a filling-up of the empty places in his heart and head. But. 

Still he found himself thinking of that night, and the mirror in which Amel had seemed a thousand reaching, grasping bloody tentacles. For an instant, he'd seen only himself in the mirror, and then a "him" who was softer and shaking and terrified of something Lestat couldn't see. He'd tried to smile, to reach out in comfort. 

And the boy had  _ screamed. _

Foolish. Pathetic. And Lestat so loved mirrors, for all their tricks.

The Trinity Gate residence, his American seat, was so cunningly decorated with them.

He adored gazing at himself, assured that his hair and eyes glowed set in skin tanned just- so (not anymore, not--Amel would quite like it, truly, to see Lestat's skin darken, but he musn't now. It was hard, at times, to recall why, why he must let the captured sun leach from his visage and render it whiter every night.)

Armand had been so clever, with the mirrors that were not windows, portals to nothing in particular. Those in the French library entranced him, with their scrolled edges and old, rippled glass. Antique. So reminiscent of his past, though of course Armand denied making it for  _ him. _

As though it could be for anyone else.

He loved the sight of Louis there, in his arms and doubled, trebled, in the glass.

Louis had no use for mirrors, could be downright puritanical in his disdain for vanity. But that only meant he wasn't aware of his arresting beauty--the better for Lestat to tell him all the alluring details. 

They were there now, Louis' lovely hair disheveled, his shirt shoved away from his collar. And in the mirror, the same--but no, not quite. Louis' hair looked lighter in the warped glass, wavier. And his own eyes were wide and staring, watching him. He reached out, languid, and as the tip of his finger touched the surface it seemed his reflection was hurtling toward the same point. 

It cracked beneath his fingertip. 

He'd been frightened, once, by his new strength. Now he couldn't fathom why. It was what allowed him absolute freedom. It was the reason Louis was back in his arms now, safe and whole. They weren't damned. They'd never been. He'd been an impossible fool all those centuries ago.

And yet he still saw it, from time to time. A specter. A ghost, unlike the lovely spirits that walked and talked and dressed to the nines in his Principality which spanned all the world.   
He saw that pathetic, cringing haunt of a boy, distracted and frightened by who knew what.

It wasn't real.

He had never--he'd been young, and confused, but not so foolish as that.

The boy fairly  _ flinched _ when their eyes met, when Lestat tried his kindest words, his sweetest, most vicious smiles. Amel pretended not to know, nor to cause it; a strange new game.

Amel was new to consciousness, Lestat reminded himself.

Perhaps as young as that boy he saw in glimpses.

Amel was someone who needed him; someone he'd saved, and could carry with him always. There was no danger of that cancerous loneliness he'd carried when he was barely turned. The gnawing certainty that he would never be good, or Good, enough to keep his loved ones. 

It was different now. Those he loved were safe, even if they were separate from him, and having them was as simple as reaching out. And beneath it, always, the preternatural that was Amel wrapped around his heart, turning his veins surely to translucent art. Maybe that was the difference--that permanent banishing of loneliness. The boy who'd lurked outside of Nicki's window and agonized over what to do for him was dead now.

They were happy. They were complete. Mirrors showed him perfection, doubled; himself and his passenger, as Amel had tried to reach out to him so often before.

Still.

It was... unsettling, at times, to glimpse from the corner of his eye that pathetic, inaccurate thing.

He felt harried by it.

Stalked.

But of course, that was the difference between them:  _ It _ was harmless. Powerless.

_ Lestat  _ would never be that again.


End file.
